“I Want The Logs!”
In the midst of this week’s back and forth between Tesla, the New York Times, and various other media outlets and bloggers, Greylock Data Scientist in Residence (and Sumo Logic Advisory Board Member) DJ Patil posted a tweet that caught my eye: “Love that everyone is using data to have a conversation. It’s about getting to the right answer.”
DJ is 100% correct, and throughout this Tesla/NY Times debate, we at Sumo Logic are thrilled to see the public recognition of the importance of log data — as a source of the truth.
Yes, log data needs to be properly analyzed and understood (as the debate makes evident), but what clearly emerged from the debate is the truism that that log data holds the absolute and authoritative record of all the events that occurred. It’s evident; just see how the discussion revolves entirely around understanding the logs.
The Bigger Picture
There is a bigger picture to this debate, which is that log data is generated everywhere, whether it be from the car you drive, the energy meter beside your home, the device you’re using to read this blog, the server delivering this content, the network delivering this content, the device I’m using to write this post… I could go on and on. And in the same way log files generated by a car hold the answer to whether it ran out of power or met range estimates, log files generated by applications, servers, network and virtualization infrastructure hold the answer to whether revenue generating applications are up and adequately performing, if customers are utilizing a newly developed feature, or if any part of an IT infrastructure is slow or experiencing downtime.
It is important to remember — these are all business critical questions. And just like Tesla needed to analyze their logs to defend their business, every enterprise, large or small, needs to be able to easily analyze and visualize their log data to ensure the health of their business.
Cars, Enterprises, and Terabytes
Before moving on, let’s not forget, enterprises are not cars, and data generated from enterprises is different from data generated by cars, particularly along three dimensions: volume, variety, and velocity. You got it… the 3 Vs of Big Data. Cars do not (or at least do not yet!) generate up to terabytes of unstructured data per day. Enterprises with large distributed IT environments do.
This is where Sumo Logic comes in. Sumo Logic is based on the recognition that enterprises need to be able to easily analyze and visualize the massive amounts of amounts of data generated by their infrastructure and business, and that current on-premise tools just can’t scale. Today, enterprises generate as much data in 10 minutes as they did in the entire year in 2003. It is therefore not surprising that legacy on-premise solutions just can’t keep up.
Sumo Logic makes it possible for enterprises of all sizes to find the truth from their data. And we do so without adding any operational overhead for our customers; Sumo Logic is a 100% cloud-based service. Large enterprises like Netflix and Land O’Lakes use Sumo Logic. Fast growing enterprises like PagerDuty and Okta do as well.
You want some answers? You have some logs? We can handle the logs.
Contact us here, or try it out for yourself by signing up for Sumo Logic Free.